Viaticum
by Resilient Heart
Summary: It's always darkest before it goes pitch black. RIP OQ.
Darkness meets her as she opens the door of her empty house. Her eyes are already adjusted- the sun has hidden itself away, and it's grey on grey outside beneath the drizzle, so she can see the outline of the half-table up against the hall, the vase of flowers on it, a few errant letters that never got opened in all the hoopla they'd all called life for far too long. They must have been laying there since before Camelot. Since before New York? Possibly. She can't remember now, but thinking too far back -farther than even a few days- has her wincing and curling in on herself in pain.

Time has stopped now that he's gone. No, not stopped per se, but... altered. It's as if one clock has stopped working, and it had to be replaced with an entirely new one, but all she wants is that old, wonderful, lovely clock back. All she wants is what she had, nothing more and nothing less.

She sees the outline of his jacket hanging on the wall, and an inhuman sound leaves her. She didn't remember putting that there, but she's sure she must have. Or Snow, perhaps. She's the only idiot stupid enough to trespass here when she's being eaten alive by grief. Regardless of how it got here, it's here now, and she stares at it in her darkened house for a moment, stares at it as if it is Robin himself, and she glares as her mind screams _Why did you leave me!? Why did you leave?_ Robin's coat does not answer her, and she softens enough to drop her heated gaze before moving over towards the draped heavy canvas, and she trips on his boot -his fucking boots that he never picks up- and she's falling, and she doesn't care about catching herself. Her bare knees scrape the carpet, and she's holding herself, hugging it all in, trying to keep herself from falling apart, but it's no use, and all she can see is his smile, and his ghostly eyes as they gazed at her with love.

Rough sobs leave her, but she has no more tears, and her sobs become screams that make her throat raw and sore, and leave her ears ringing in the too-quietness of the empty house she used to share with her dead soul mate.

When she wakes up, the first thing she notices is the pounding in her head. The hat she'd worn to try to hide her face from prying eyes -from the rain, she'd told herself. Queens don't hide- is askew and pressing into her temple unkindly. Sitting up, she lets the hat fall from her head, and notices that, despite the general numbness of her mind and body, it's actually really fucking cold in her house. She'd left the door open, she realizes, when she came home. She'd left it open for who-knew-how-many-hours while she'd sobbed and fell into an exhausted slump onto the floor, and the cold had leeched its way inside.

Part of her wants to just stay there, to never move so that she can waste away in front of this odd, makeshift effigy, this poor-man's shrine of a well-worn jacket and some beat up boots. But she's Regina Mills. Even soaking in grief and regret, she knows that she would go out with more dignity than that.

Her joints pop as she makes careful moves to stand. Her feet and legs below the knee are tingling with pinpricks of pain; she can't move quite yet, and it almost makes her laugh. How ridiculous that something so small and inconsequential should keep her on her knees when she's decided to move. She stands up anyway and stumbles as she can't feel her limbs, but eventually, she kicks off her stilettos and black wrap, and reaches for Robin's heavy jacket.

Moving towards the door, she pushes it closed, the shaft of moonlight illuminating the hallway suddenly cut off, and she's alone in real darkness now. A wild part of her wonders if Robin would be so kind as to haunt her, but then she remembers that Robin wouldn't be a ghost since his existence was essentially wiped out. Out of everything, it's this fact alone that burns her the most. It's the fact that everything he was now doesn't exist that makes the dull, full pressure build behind her eyes, and oh god, she'd thought she'd cried every tear she had, but her eyes are burning like fire, and she knows she will bear this pain until the day she dies.

Sometime between gasping for breath and making it upstairs, she's slipped his jacket on, and she feels the ghost of his warmth and scent envelop her. It feels different now- hollow. The part of him that she'd seen reach out to her, the bright blue spectre, she can only surmise was the part of his soul that had resided within her, and she feels empty now, empty and without warmth and without love now that that most sacred part is gone. She feels like less of a good person, and she wonders if any good part of her was actually her, and not him. She wonders if there is anything redeeming about her at all -she thinks not. She thinks that there couldn't be, not for karma to punish her so thoroughly.

The bed is rumpled and unmade- she can't remember the last time they'd slept in it, but some emergency or other had risen them from it and it had stood unmade. She moves closer to his side, his side that will stay perpetually empty, and feels grief crashing down on her once more.

How can she survive this? This loud silence, this raging normalcy? The sky isn't bleeding, there aren't demons wailing, and the ground isn't shaking, but she wants it to be. She wants the rest of the world to feel what she feels, because nothing is right, and everything hurts, and she just can't take the pain of it all, of knowing he's gone, that she couldn't even end her suffering to see him because _he doesn't exist._

His pillow is soft beneath her head, and she thinks about how he didn't spend nearly enough time here; how there was never enough time for them. How they never even got to say The Words to one another. His voice still echoes in her mind, calling her his future, and she wants to laugh- would find it funny if it wasn't so fucking painful that she can't breathe.

She curls up in the sheets, fully dressed and still draped in his jacket, and Regina cries more, because she can't help it. Through the watery kaleidoscope of her tears, she sees the nightlight in the bathroom- the bright cerulean color both comforting and paining her. She falls asleep sometime later, and when she dreams, it's of a man whose soul was lost, but whose mark was true and undeniable. If she cannot have him -and surely she cannot, surely she'll be without him for the entirety of her existence- then she will treasure this emptiness in her heart, in her soul, because it will remind her that he existed at all.


End file.
